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Humans Enter the Robot Equation

Robots are becoming increasingly more capable of optimizing objective functions for physical tasks, from navigation, to dexterous manipulation, to flight. The ultimate goal is to perform these tasks for us, in our environments. We want cars driving on our roads, or personal robots assisting us with activities of daily living as we age in our own homes. Right now, we tend to be merely obstacles to these robots. I believe we need to be more -- humans need to enter the robot equation in two fundamental ways. First, we are agents who take actions in the same spaces, putting a burden on robots that their actions are well-coordinated with ours. Second, and perhaps more importantly, we hold the key to what the robot's objective function be in the first place -- robots need to optimize for what we want, for our values, for what helps us. In this talk, I will summarize my lab's journey into making robots formally reason about people in these two ways.